Author Archives: Anna Clutterbuck-Cook

booknotes: so late, so soon

06 Tuesday Apr 2010

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Immersed as I have been in thesis research, I haven’t been doing so much actual book reading lately, at least of the kind that can be encapsulated in “booknotes” posts. But while I was on my travels out west in March, I read a couple of books I thought it would be worth mentioning here. And here’s the first.

I found D’Arcy Fallon’s memoir, So Late, So Soon when I did an internet search (yes, using Google) for information related to Lighthouse Ranch, a Christian commune in northern California that one of my oral history narrators mentioned visiting as part of an Oregon Extension field trip in the mid-1970s. Fallon joined the commune after arriving there as a hitch-hiking teenager in the early Seventies, drawn in by the commune’s sense of order and purpose, eventually marrying a fellow communard and remaining with the community for three years, despite the increasing dissonance she felt between her own inclinations and the expectations of the commune’s leaders about her role as a Christian, as a woman, and as a member of the community.

Now a professor of composition and creative nonfiction a the University of Colorado, Fallon tells her story with lyrical compassion; although the depression and oppression she felt in her latter days as part of Lighthouse Ranch is palpable, she also manages to convey a clear understanding of why her younger self might have sought out this type of community, at this point in her life, and the difficult of extricating herself once she had become immersed. The book has brevity (I read it on one leg of my flight from Boston to Portland, Oregon) and offers rich details that give us insight into a particular subculture within the counterculture: that of the Jesus Freaks who adopted much of the outward, material culture of the hippies and melded it with a sometimes dogmatic adherence to Christian doctrine, theology, and religious practice. Anyone with an interest in either the counterculture of the era or in the dynamics of religious communities (communal or otherwise) will likely find it an interesting read.

quick hit: america’s earliest sex survey

05 Monday Apr 2010

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The latest issue of the Stanford Magazine (April/May 2010) carries an awesome, thought-provoking article about the earliest-known sex survey that documents the habits and attitudes of American women around the turn of the twentieth century.

In 1973, historian Carl Degler was combing the University archives, gathering research for a book on the history of the family. Sifting through the papers of Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher, who taught in Stanford’s hygiene department around the turn of the 20th century, he came across a mysteriously bound file. Degler nearly put it aside, figuring it was a manuscript for one of Mosher’s published works, mostly statistical treatises on women’s height, strength and menstruation. But instead, he recalls, “I opened it up and there were these questionnaires”— questionnaires upon which dozens of women, most born before 1870, had inscribed their most intimate thoughts.

In other words, it was a sex survey. A Victorian sex survey. It is the earliest known study of its type, long preceding, for example, the 1947 and 1953 Kinsey Reports, whose oldest female respondents were born in the 1890s. The Mosher Survey recorded not only women’s sexual habits and appetites, but also their thinking about spousal relationships, children and contraception. Perhaps, it hinted, Victorian women weren’t so Victorian after all.

Continue reading The Sex Scholar, by Kara Platoni in the Stanford Magazine.

sunday smut: links on sex and gender (no. 16)

04 Sunday Apr 2010

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Let’s see what the feeds brought in this week . . .

Last week, Miriam @ Feministing pointed us toward the shortlist for the LAMDA awards, while also highlighting the problem with having specific categories for gay/lesbian/bi/trans fiction and nonfiction.

A bigger problem can be found in Baltimore, Maryland where the Catholic Archdiocese is suing the city for the right to continue false advertising tactics that encourage women seeking abortion care to crisis pregnancy centers which do not offer abortion services or referrals. As SarahMC @ The Pursuit of Harpyness quips, “I thought ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness’ was a component of Christianity.” Looks like maybe not.

Another way of exerting control over women’s bodies can come through cultural assumptions about how our bodies work. Over at RhRealityCheck, sex educator Heather Corinna unpacks some of the cultural myths about the visibility of sexual activity (or lack thereof) on the bodies of women and girls.

Which pairs nicely with Jill’s piece @ Feministe about how strange it is that being pro-sex gets you attacked for being anti-sex (yes really). She takes on the rape apologetics of a college columnist at American University and makes yet another strong argument for why framing rape as mostly a “misunderstanding” or “miscommunication” between two people ignores the act of violence that those who commit rape engage in. (Trigger warning)

It’s scary to think that someone could initially say no, then change their minds and say yes, and then say that they meant “no” all along. And that’s the picture that rape apologists paint: A fun, drunken night, and the next day the cops are at your door.

But that’s not how this really works.

Most on-campus rapists don’t identify as rapists, but they do realize that they are forcing women into unwanted sex . . . I find it really helpful to actually think through, fully, an acquaintance-rape scenario as they more typically happen . . .

. . . You’re engaging in some sexual activity with someone, and they start to pull back or their body stiffens, and they say “no.” When you look at their face, they look scared. Do you continue anyway?

You’re engaging in some sexual activity and then they say “stop” or “no.” If they say “no” or “stop” or they yell, do you keep going? If they cry, you keep going? If they try to push you away, do you keep going?

You’re engaging in some sexual activity, and the person you’re with says to stop. Do you threaten them in order to convince them to have sex with you?. . .

Go read the whole thing, and bookmark it for the next time you need something to point skeptics toward.

Also on the subject of young people and sexual agency, Laura Penny @ The Guardian offers a powerful op-ed piece on the way youth sexual subjectivity is co-opted by adult agendas. “For young women in particular, a double standard is in place. We are pitied for growing up amid media encouraging erotic availability, but we are also portrayed as wanton strumpets, vomiting our worthless GCSEs into drains with our knickers around our knees, especially if we are “girls from deprived areas”. Nowhere is there the idea that young women might have their own minds.”

Not only young people, of course, but a myriad of other folks who don’t fit our cultural ideal of acceptable sexual hotness are relentlessly policed when it comes to personal agency. Chloe @ Feministing follows up on her post about the show Ugly Betty with another post titled “Beautiful girls are bitchy and ugly girls are nice.” Chloe has also offered some great reflections on fucking dating while feminist, in follow-up to Jaclyn Friedman’s interview with Amanda Hess @ The Sexist. Jaclyn has clearly provoked a lot of thought among those of us in the feminist blogosphere about the role of feminism in our personal lives and relationships.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville, meanwhile, guest blogs at Sociological Images about the fat shaming in the television show “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.” While I don’t think there’s anything wrong with media that demonstrates how to cook nutritious meals that are simple, tasty, inexpensive, I think it’s important to critique shows that buy into the cultural myth that people who do not conform to our cultural standards of thinness are automatically unhealthy, lazy and immoral. And it sounds like this particular show carries those messages in spades.

If you can’t view the video, here’s a quick summary: Headless fatties? Check. Enormous food stock footage? Check. OHNOES Obesity Crisis TM? Check. Being fat is ugly? Check. Fat people are lazy? Check. Fat people are stupid? Check. Fat people are sick? Check. DEATHFAT? Check. Mother-blaming for fat kids? Check. Fat as a moral failure? Check. Religious shaming of fat? Check. Fat people don’t have “the tools” to not be fat? Check. Fat people need a skinny savior? Checkity-check-check!

I want to note that there is, buried somewhere beneath the 10 metric fucktons of fat-shaming (and not an incidental dose of misogyny, for good measure), information about healthful eating (e.g. not eating any fresh veg, ever, isn’t good for anyone), but this is information that could be delivered without a scene in which a mother of four whose husband is gone three weeks a month is told that she’s killing her children while she’s weeping at her kitchen table.

The premiere episode has absolutely zero structural critique, not even a passing comment about the reason that millions of mothers feed their kids processed foods is because it’s cheap and fast, which is a pretty good solution for people who are short on money and time.

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s pretty immoral to spend your time shaming folks about individual choices while ignoring the structural forces that limit their range of choices, not to mention ignoring the ways in which our assumptions about health are (partially if not wholly) culturally constructed rather than set in stone.

Also on the subject of visual representation, some Holocaust scholars are disputing the legitimacy of including images of lesbians in a holocaust memorial highlighting homosexual victims of the Nazi regime. Arguing that persecution of lesbian women was “not comparable” to that of gay men, and that using an image of two women on the memorial (as part of a rotating series of videos depicting same-sex couples kissing) “distorts history.” While I think it is a legitimate scholarly point to make, that because of mid-century understandings of sexual orientation and gender men were disproportionately targeted, lesbians were hardly free to express their sexuality without punishment (see Aimee and Jaguar).

Also on the subject of queer history, Simon Callow, writing for The Guardian, muses about a new history claiming to tell the tale of “gay icons through the ages,” which instead fails to engage critically in the historical debate over how valid it is, exactly, to read our own understandings of sexuality back into the past

As David Halperin points out in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (Routledge), it is virtually meaningless to compare the experience of a New Guinean youth who, in order to reinforce his masculinity, daily ingests the semen of his elders, to that of a young gay man in Manhattan who is heavily into fellatio. Both involve sex between men, but the nature of the participation is radically different. Such questions are fundamental to any overview of gay history, but they do not seem to have come within Ambrose’s remit.

Similar questions about changing conceptions of human sexuality plagued the characters of the web comic Cat and Girl earlier this week (thanks to Hanna for the link), as one character doesn’t understand the word “cisgendered,” and another has to explain. It made me think again about how vocabulary has been changing so quickly within the gender and sexuality field, and how to communicate why changing how we speak matters, even though it is by its very nature a never-ending process of transformation (language, ideally, changes as we change to better meet our needs as human beings).

And finally, on a lighter note: “President Obama—Our First Gay President?” Hendrik Hertzberg @ The New Yorker News Desk thinks not, but offers his own nominee for who might have been, at least by the Bill Clinton/Toni Morrison standard.

*image credit: Nude Lady with Drink by dave11198 @ Flickr.com.

quick hit: idzie on "gaps" in education

03 Saturday Apr 2010

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Blogger Idzie over at I’m Unschooled. Yes, I Can Write has a piece up about the idea that home education or unschooling is problematic because people who don’t go to school run a greater risk of suffering from “gaps” in their knowledge. She writes

This [fear] strikes me as coming from such a very schooly mindset: a mindset that says that schools have the answer. That everything chosen for the school curriculum is Important, and MUST be learned at some point or other for the learner to be a properly functioning member of society! It comes from a presumption that the government [or the authority, I would add, behind a private school — whether religious or non-religious] knows everything that’s essential knowledge for every human being. And it comes from the belief that there IS one essential body of knowledge out there to be learned!

. . .

As far as I’m concerned, a healthy community is made up of many people with many different skills, experiences, and knowledge bases. The things that are important for each individual to learn are those important to that individual. The idea of “gaps in knowledge” at all is pretty ridiculous, actually, when everyone can agree that there is a colossal amount of information out there. No one can hope to absorb any more than a tiny fraction of the accumulated knowledge available to them, so everyone no matter what their education will have “gaps”! It’s just a matter of whether the knowledge you do have is of your own choosing, knowledge that is meaningful and worthwhile to you, or whether it’s chosen by someone else, and forced down your throat “for your own good”.

Check out the whole post over at Idzie’s blog.

quick hit: favorite april fool’s post

02 Friday Apr 2010

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Well, to be honest my favorite April Fool’s Day joke might have been Google Translate for Animals (thanks to my sister, Maggie, for bringing this to my attention via Twitter).

But a close second of the day was Amanda Marcotte’s Sex Tips for Feminists. Parodying the dating advice of faux sex-positive feminist spokeswomen like Laura Sessions Stepp and the Independent Women’s Forum, Amanda offers some guidence to those feminists who have “settled” for a man who might (let’s say) be a tad suspicious of her political inclinations. What, oh, what is a girl to do if she wants to have her man and her feminism too?

Talking about feminism. There’s no need to do this. Obviously, this seems hard to avoid, since it’s an important part of your life, until you realize that you don’t really need to talk to your man-child much at all. The vast majority of comments you make should affirm what he’s said or be sexy talk, though you’re obviously okay if what you say has to be said in the shortest but most ladylike way possible. “Not to nag, but perhaps you shouldn’t step on that rattlesnake,” is okay under most deadly circumstances.

But don’t worry! If you feel bottled up, that’s why god invented blogging. You can spill all that stuff on your blog, and don’t forget that you’re allowed to talk to your friends on nights when he’s doing something else and isn’t any the wiser.

Books. Being a feminist, you probably have a lot of these, and many of them have man-child-startling titles that could provoke unpleasant discussions, which as you know are strictly forbidden. But don’t worry. Your best friend here is one of those fat markers, the kind you use when labeling boxes. With a few quick edits of the cover, even the most forbidding feminist tomes can seem like sexily unthreatening, empowerful even. Don’t forget that men-children can get antsy if women are more successful than them! But your friend the marker plus some ingenuity can do a quick un-sexing of most female authors’ names.

Enjoy the whole post over at Pandagon.

feminist values: commenting on comments

01 Thursday Apr 2010

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Just before I left for Oregon, I got into a conversation with a commenter, aHuman, on my post about discussing feminism with anti feminists. The conversation got interrupted by my research trip, but this past week after I came home I stumbled across a comment thread at Feministe that touched on an issue similar to one that aHuman brought up toward the end of our exchange: what is the nature of a feminist value system?

More specifically, aHuman responded to an analogy I made about “feminist” being an umbrella concept kind of like “Christian,” in that self-identified feminists don’t necessarily agree with every single other feminist, yet they share a few core tenets (for more, see the comment thread). In response, aHuman wrote

I find it very revealing that you draw parallels between feminism and Christianity. Well there are very good reasons for why religion is kept strictly out of politics and law in all western democracies (certainly the USA). So I’d like to call for an equal treatment under the constitution of feminism with all other religions. That meaning mostly, that anyone can be a member and believe in it or not, but it cannot and should not have any say in politics or education.

Religions are belief systems, not a theory and not an academic discipline.

Actually I’m not that harsh with feminism. I don’t classify it as a belief system but as a political ideology. If anything, I’d compare it with Marxism. Either way, it certainly is not an academic discipline or even a theory.

And this underlines my point about the radical members of feminism. If feminism was an academic discipline or a scientific theory, then those radicals would have been treated far more harshly and critically than they have been. They would have never had enough attention to get a public voice.

There is a lot to unpack in this comment, obviously. For starters, in order to determine whether feminism is a “belief system,” “theory” or “academic discipline” we’d have to decide what we meant by each of those terms and whether they were mutually exclusive. I have no final word on this, but I do have a very personal response that has to do with how I think about feminism (my primary political identity) in relation to my academic work, and how I think about feminism in relation to metaphysical belief systems (religion). And I’m going to try and share some of them. But first, I offer a second comment from Jill over at Feministe who was responding to a commenter in the comment thread of a blog post on dating while feminist. The commenter asked

It’s an interesting point. Is feminism even more integral to feminists than their culture and their religion (or lack thereof)?

And Jill replies

I’m sure the answer to that question differs from feminist to feminist. For me, my culture and my religious beliefs have probably shaped me as a person more than or at least as much as feminism has. But when I’m looking for a partner, shared values vis a vis feminism are much, much more important to me than shared cultural or religious backgrounds/beliefs. Feminism is distinct from other opinions or traditions that I hold because it is a lens that I choose to use to view and pick apart and critique the world around me. It is, for me, the way in which I can maintain my sanity in a place that often feels really fundamentally unfair and ass-backwards. I need a partner to be able to understand that.

I particularly like Jill’s description of the feminist lens as what she chooses “to use to view and pick apart and critique the world around me. It is, for me, the way in which I can maintain my sanity.” I like it because, for me, this was why conscious, political feminism (a conscious critique of cultural frameworks and social structures, as opposed to my childhood “girls and boys are equally capable, worthy human beings” feminism) spoke to me as a teenager. I could feel what was wrong, but I didn’t have the language to articulate it effectively, particularly in the face of conservative Christian adults who were arguing that queer sexuality was immoral and women should be subservient to men, at least spiritually if not materially. Feminist theory provided me with a language to talk about these feelings, and a political framework through which to try and change what was making the world feel (on the worst days) uninhabitable.

My very first academic class that specifically incorporated feminist theory was an intro level theology class on Christian Feminism, taught by a member of my liberal arts college’s Religion department (mostly Reformed, protestant Christian theology and history, although with some ecumenical and world religion offerings). Because of this, I’ve always been kind of taken aback by people who suggest that feminism is a religion. I heard a conservative Catholic faculty member — at a different institution — once argue that feminists couldn’t possibly be Christian because they held heretical religious views that were oppositional to Christian values. However, most of the self-identified feminists I’ve known personally over the years would identify themselves as religious — and often that religious identity is distinct from their feminist identity (that is, when asked about their spirituality, they would say they are Christian or Jewish or Muslim, or Wiccan, agnostic or atheist — not Feminist).

Feminism, as a lens through which to understand the world, does not attempt to answer questions about the metaphysical realm (what happens to us after death, whether there is a God, etc.). Feminist theology, regardless of the religious tradition from whence it springs, tackles these questions from a feminist perspective — but it is not in itself a spiritual orientation toward the world. Or, at least, I have not yet come upon a feminist who understands it as such. Feminism, as a analytical tool, attempts to understand how women and men are constrained by various cultural assumptions of sex and gender; as a political movement, feminism seeks to counter inequalities between human beings related to sex and gender (as well as supporting a wider range of intersecting issues such as race, disability, age, etc.) It is a values system, in that feminists make certain judgments about what is right/wrong, healthy/unhealthy, moral/immoral (whatever terms you choose). For example, feminists belief that human beings should all be valued equally. That is a value judgment.

However, it is not an inherently religious value judgment: one could make such an argument without drawing on any metaphysical beliefs whatsoever.

When it comes to my feminist self and my academic self, I would say that feminism informs my academic work, and is often the subject of my academic work, although the methodologies that I use depend on the project at hand. aHuman suggests that religion (and feminism, if it is treated as a religion) has no place in schools, yet I would point out that the study of religion and theology are both important academic disciplines, as are political science and philosophy. All of these disciplines understand the world through a particular framework (or frameworks), and yet all of them are seen as legitimate fields of academic study. Feminism, to my mind, falls into this category of something that can both be studied and serve as an analytical framework through which to study other subjects. In this way, it is similar to, say, postmodern philosophy, liberal economic theory, or Marxist theory. So I disagree with aHuman that feminism is something ill-suited to intellectual inquiry or academic research.

Returning to Jill’s reflections on the primacy of feminist values, or a feminist orientation toward the world, I am reminded of a paper I had to write in undergrad for our mandatory Senior Seminar (a capstone seminar that was supposed to help all final-year students integrate faith, scholarship, and vocation) in which I basically argued that I hold religious practice accountable to my feminist beliefs: that is, in my worldview, feminist humanism trumps religion. I don’t care (at least not a lot) whether someone chooses “feminist” as a political identity — but if they’re not acting in ways I believe reflect a fundamental belief that women (and all human beings, no matter how marginal) are human beings worthy of our care and attention as fellow persons, then I’m not okay with that. The same goes for any other religious or political philosophy: does it incorporate a conscious critique of power relations and a belief in the worth of all human beings? If not, I’m out.

In that way, yes. Feminism, both as a theoretical framework and as a political stance, trumps my religious/spiritual beliefs and also my cultural background as a core part of my identity. At the same time (bear with me) I’d also argue it’s somewhat incidental: an accident of time and place. While I believe that culture is a powerful force in shaping our identities, I am not enough of a postmodern purist to argue that we bring nothing unique of ourselves into the world. Feminism, as I encountered it, spoke to me, my Self. It suggested a world in which I could thrive. And I have yet to encounter another theory or movement for social change that offered a similar world: a world in which I was invited to be my Self, in the company of other Selves. This includes religion, which often demands of us not compassion and attention to valuing individual human beings, but policing behavior and judgment that diminishes Selves and our connection to God (if you believe in God) or the metaphysical world.

This isn’t to say I believe feminism is the “final word,” as in a closed, finished philosophy — it is ever-evolving in both theory and practice, and I feel I continue to grow with it. But I will say that feminism is my starting place. And so far, it hasn’t disappointed.

from the archives: "to lady patrons"

31 Wednesday Mar 2010

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Working on my digitization project yesterday, I came across this announcement printed in a theater program for a production of Shakespeare’s King Henry V performed at the Hollis St. Theatre here in Boston in April of 1901.

TO LADY PATRONS

The established rule at the Hollis St. Theatre, requiring ladies to remove their hats, bonnets, or other head-dress while witnessing the performance, applies to all parts of the auditorium, including the boxes and loges. It is essential to the comfort and convenience of all of our patrons in general that this rule be strictly enforced.

Ladies who are unwilling or unable to conform to the rule are earnestly requested to leave the Theatre without delay, and to recieve the price of their ticket at the box office.

I’m sure someone who knows a great deal more about theater history than I do could talk at more length about the shift in attitudes this represents in the cultural acceptance of women attending the theater and, bless me, being encouraged to sit in a public space with bare heads! I think my favorite bit is the “earnestly requested,” as it has such a polite imploring tone. Contrast that with the “turn off your cell phone” announcements today, which are so often couched in cajoling humor. Not that one method is better or worse, but I do think it says something about the audience that the managers of the theater expected their plea to be taken seriously.

requiem to a companion: "don’t make me go back. please. don’t make me go back."

30 Tuesday Mar 2010

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Warning: SPOILERS.

This post is about the Dr. Who two-parter, “End of Time,” in which David Tennant finishes his tenure as the 10th Doctor. If you care about watching the episodes before reading what happens DO NOT READ FURTHER.

So I’m gonna be upfront here and say I’m a relative newcomer to the whole Dr. Who universe. For the perspective of a lifelong fan, I defer to Hanna’s own reactions to “End of Time,” “i don’t want to go,” posted over at …fly over me, evil angel…; I’m not gonna try to do the same level of analysis she does there — but there’s something (or, more specifically, someone) I really need to write about here.

And that’s Donna.

More specifically, it’s about how Donna needed to die.

Let me explain.

Donna is, hands-down, my favorite Dr. Who new-series companion. Not to diss Rose and Martha (both of whom I like for their own sakes), but from the minute Donna Noble appeared on the Tardis in “Runaway Bride” and slapped David Tennant’s Doctor upside the head for, well, being himself, I was sold. Donna is to the Doctor what you’d get if you crossed an exasperated big sister (“bite me, alien boy“) with an adoring niece who’s favorite Uncle had just given her the opportunity to walk away from her infantalized existence (trapped in dead-end temp jobs, dominated by her demanding, unhappy mother) and take on the universe.

After the Doctor rescues her from a wedding gone wrong in “The Runaway Bride,” Donna packs the boot of her car packed in readiness for interstellar space/time travel and seeks out the Doctor by following suspicious, potentially alien activity, in hopes that she can reinvent herself as his companion.

By mutual agreement, theirs is not a romantic or sexual relationship. Though there is, by the end of Donna’s tenure, a deep, deep love that would have been believable (at least in my mind) as sexual intimacy if the writers had chosen to take it in that direction. But they didn’t and it worked just as well (possibly better) without the simmering sexual tension that is at present an over-used trope in television serials. The relationship between Donna and the Doctor was on some level unequal (which is where the “cool uncle” part comes in; he’s a nine-hundred-year-old Time Lord, for goodness’ sake!) while also being entirely egalitarian (big sister who doesn’t take any crap from her little bro).

And I also think that, more than either of the companions immediately preceding her, Donna was unequivocal about the fact that joining the Doctor on the Tardis was her decision from the start. And one about which she had no second thoughts. Possibly this is because when we meet Donna she is older than both Martha and Rose, both more certain of who she is and wants to be in the world and also restless, full of unrealized potential. She’s ready for a challenge, and realizes it. Which is why she packs that suitcase and goes looking for her spaceman.

So on the one hand, it’s completely understandable, given this love between them, that the Doctor — faced with Donna’s imminent death as the result of a human-time lord meta-crisis (no, I’m not exactly sure either) which saved the universe from invasion by Daleks — makes a quite human mistake. Given the choice of either allowing Donna to die with dignity — in full knowledge of who she is and the choices she has made — or “saving” her by wiping her memory, the Doctor chooses to put her on the Time Lord equivalent of life support, a medically-induced coma, if you will. She becomes a shell of her former self, with no memory of the life she had in which she was a Self with agency: in which she acted in the world.

What the Doctor did to her, even in the name of salvaging her physical existence, was a violation. In writing this post I sat down and watched the scene in “Journey’s End” where the Doctor erases Donna’s memory. She tells him no. Repeatedly. “Don’t make me go back,” she pleads with him, “please, don’t make me go back.” And he does it anyway.

This is NOT OKAY. Understandable, maybe, in a broken, human, bad-decision-in-a-time-of-crisis sort of way. But NOT. OKAY.

So when it became clear that Donna re-appeared in the “End of Time” two-parter, both Hanna and I were hopeful that the writers had realized the error of their ways and were going to, finally, screw up the courage to do what they’d failed to do in the first instance, and that was let Donna die. After all: for all intents and purposes, she had died already — as both Donna’s grandfather and the Doctor acknowledge in the opening scenes of “End of Time.” As Hanna writes,

bernard cribbins does a(nother) great turn [in “End of Time”] as donna’s grandfather, really providing the companion for the show and doing a fantastic job at it, too, keen to see the doctor again, eager to help, but also desperate to understand why the doctor abandoned donna and why the doctor, seemingly so lonely and at loose ends, won’t just take donna back travelling with him.

Suffice to say, we were desperate to have Donna return to herself (please please please!) and die (in some sort of meta-crisis crisis that would have, in turn, caused the Doctor to regenerate, mayhap?) in what would have been restitution: the knowing death she was asking for at the end of “Journey’s End,” which the Doctor denied her.

But no.

What we had to watch was not-alive Donna getting married in what Hanna and I swear was the same fucking wedding dress the Doctor had rescued her from in “The Runaway Bride.” On the surface happy, but visibly confused, slightly vacant, entirely absent in a performance that must have been the devil for Catherine Tate to play.

Let me repeat. The “happy” ending is the one that puts our heroine back where she was on day one, with no memory of the life-changing experiences she’s had.

The attitude of the writers, it seems to me, is neatly summed up in this ninety-second recap of “the Donna Noble story”:

So . . . Donna gets to go “happily” back to her pre-Tardis existence after being the most important-fucking-woman in the universe with absolutely no memory of the experience . . . and the character we’re supposed to feel sorry for is the Doctor who (boo hoo) has to spend his Christmas alone?

Sorry. Not buying it.

Possibly I have a little issue with memory wipes.

Call me crazy.

I find myself wondering: Did no one on the writing team see this? Did no one realize that for those of us who care about Donna, the End of Time was basically two hours of watching our wonderful, vibrant, life-filled Donna Noble suffocate to death in the life she never wanted in the first place? That we could see that haunted, bewildered look in the back of her eyes in every frame? That having to sit through the “happy ending” that saw her married to a stranger while her grandfather looked sadly on and the Doctor blessed the union and walked away was roughly the equivalent of driving red hot nails through the center of our eyeballs?

While I don’t agree with everything author Philip Pullman writes, I’m a longtime fan of his Sally Lockhart novels, a young adult series in which one of the major characters dies in the second book. I once read an essay (I’m sorry I can’t track it down!) in which he reflected on the decision to kill the character. In earlier drafts, he acknowledged, he hadn’t had the guts to do it, merely causing the character disfigurement. But a friend told him the character had to die.

Because people die. Good people die. And if fiction doesn’t deal with the death of people who we wish didn’t die, it’s not true.

And you end up writing a poorer story.

You end up doing more violence to your characters than you would have if you’d let them be true to themselves — even to the death.

Donna should have died. And Doctor Who was less true, as a piece of fiction, because she lived.

It’s going to be a while before I’ll be able to think about forgiving that.

And I’ll sure as hell never be able to forget it.

sunday smut: links on sex and gender (no. 15)

28 Sunday Mar 2010

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Because when you can start out a links list on sex and gender with an xkcd comic like this, why wouldn’t you?

Since this is the cleaning-up-my-feeds-from-Oregon edition, this is gonna just be authors, titles and selected quotes folks. I’m trying to get my blogging feet under me again (not to mention my work feet, in-school feet, and domestic-life feet), so posts might be a little more sluggish than usual in the coming weeks. Maybe even the next few months, depending on work schedules and how the writing of my thesis (eek!) goes, so bear with me. I promise I’ll try not to disappear entirely. But the one-a-day rate I’ve been posting this past six months will probably not be possible in the immediate future.

Amanda Hess @ The Sexist | Deconstructing Rape Myths: On Short Skirts (On Lesbians). “If she’s out in a same-sex couple that’s perceived as insufficiently feminine, she’ll get negative attention. If she’s out in a same-sex couple that’s perceived as fuckable by the standards of some heterosexual male passerby, she’ll get negative sexual attention.”

Amanda Marcotte @ Pandagon | Women chasing, men running. “suggesting that couples that are living together are generally stuck in the she’s chasing/he’s running mode doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

Amanda Hess @ The Sexist | College Sex Columnist on Masturbation, Money Shots, and Scandalized Grandmothers. “Over the past couple of months, Hill has heard from the haters (‘Can you tell me how talking about masturbating is ‘progress’ in female journalism?’), lovers (‘THIS ROCKS SO MUCH’), and one student who wrote in opposing Hill’s column because her grandmother read it one time and became overwhelmed by the column’s impolite subject matter. Seriously.

Thomas @ Yes Means Yes | Review: Guyland. “I don’t think Kimmel’s assertions about Guyland bear being generalized. But as long as I read them as critiques of a subculture, of Dude/Bro, I thought they were very good.”

Also by Thomas @ Yes Means Yes | Affirmative Consent as Legal Standard? “If two people lean in to kiss each other at the same time and stick their tongues in each other’s mouths, I think we can be pretty clear on consent.” (Long and complex, but worth reading if you care about how to support better legal and cultural expectations about consensual sex).

Natasha Curson @ The Guardian | Trans people still miss out on equality. “If you were to decide, for your own comfort and wellbeing, that you wanted to present at work as one gender two days a week, and another for the rest of the week, the law does not provide for you, and only the most enlightened of employers are likely to support you. But why shouldn’t someone be able to do that, if they feel comfortable enough with themselves to want to be visible?”

Susie Bright @ Susie Bright’s Journal | My Little Runaways – What You Won’t See in the Movie. “Let me make something clear that the movie only hints at: The Runaways band would not have happened, could not have been conceived, without the Underground Dyke Punk Groupie Slut culture that stretched from the San Fernando Valley to the bowels of Orange County.”

Greta Christina @ The Blowfish Blog | Some Evolving Thoughts About Weight and Sex. “A huge amount of my libido right now is focused on the changes my body is going through, and the ways it’s different from what it was before. Which is understandable: things that are in flux get more attention than things that are in relative stasis. But this has had the unfortunate effect of making me feel weirdly disconnected from my body and my sexuality of the past.”

Rebecca @ The Thang Blog | Talking to highschoolers (about being trans). “I did have one student ask, ‘So, if you did get…the surgery, and you like women…how would you have sex after?’ One of the other students waved her fingers in front of his face, which made me laugh.”

Roxann MtJoy @ Women’s Rights Blog | Panel Says Pregnant Women Don’t Have the Right to Refuse Surgery. “Personally, I would think that since a pregnant woman is still a human being, she should still have all of the rights of any other human being in this country. I would be wrong.”

Chloe @ Feministing | Pretty ugly: Can we please stop pretending that beautiful women aren’t beautiful? “So, what does it mean when even the ‘ugly’ women on our screens are conventionally beautiful? Firstly, it means that the bar for female beauty is being set higher than ever: if Tina Fey, Lea Michele and America Ferrera are ‘ugly,’ what hope is there for the rest of us? It also means that we’re being told one thing and sold another.”

Ashley Sayeau @ Salon | Help! My Daughter’s a Girly Girl. “I would never have imagined that I would essentially live in the Disney palace, forced by my daughter to talk in “a handsome voice” and mostly about getting married or mopping the kitchen. “Cinderella loves tidying up!” she frequently proclaims.”

Courtney E. Martin @ The American Prospect | A Manifesta Revisited. “They made it okay to be feminist and funny (this had always been the case, of course, but I’d been duped).”

Tracy Clark-Flory @ Salon | Sexual shame is so hot right now. “As I see it, young women have fully proved that we can have one-night stands, hear us roar — and maybe we’re beginning to also allow ourselves more nuanced feelings about our hookups.”

Marty Klein @ Sexual Intelligence | Court Finally Limits Persecution of Teen Sexuality. “These parents are heroes for insisting that the government doesn’t own their kids’ bodies or sexuality.”

Hadley Freeman @ The Guardian | Why everyone deserves to go to their high school prom. “When McMillen protested, saying “I won’t pretend ‘I’m not gay’ and brought in the lawyers, the school cancelled the prom. ‘Thanks for ruining my senior year,’ one classmate sneered.”

S @ The F-word | Painful Vagina? Your Poor Husband! “I am convinced that a young man of my age, complaining of serious sexual dysfunction and pain, would not have been treated in the same way. Firstly because in an otherwise healthy young male, loss of sexual function would rightly be seen as devastating (whereas for me it was treated as a mild difficulty), and furthermore because I do not think these doctors would assume a man was being ‘over-emotional’ or was suffering from a psychological problem rather than a physical one.”

G.L. Morrison @ SexIs | Labels and Street Signs: Navigating Gender & Orientation in the Global Village and Cyber-ghettos. “Should I define myself (gender and orientation) by what I am, what I am doing, who I am doing it with? If I were sleeping with multiple men or looking for male partners I would call myself bisexual (though I wouldn’t believe it) to protect other lesbians from the advances of men wanting to be ‘the next exception to the rule.'”

Amanda Hess @ The Sexist (can you tell she’s my new blog crush?) | Why Rape Isn’t One Big Misunderstanding. “Researchers then asked the men how they know when a woman is refusing sex. The men indicated that women also often rely on body language and euphemism to relay their lack of consent. Interestingly, even though the men professed to favoring the exact same tactics, they attributed these devices to the way that ‘women are.'”

Greta Christina @ The Blowfish Blog | Closeted Politicians and Bi Invisibility. “It’s occurring to me that it might make more sense to talk about right-wing homophobic politicians who are secretly having sex with same-sex partners . . . instead of talking about right-wing homophobic politicians who are secretly gay.”

Amanda Hess @ The Sexist (see?) | Fucking While Feminist, With Jaclyn Friedman. “A couple of guys were shocked that I like to play various games in bed, because I’m a feminist. That’s always really interesting to me. I’m always like, ‘Are you kidding me? The feminists I know are the craziest women in bed you can find!’ Those are the moments where I feel like a one-woman feminist PR machine.”

And before this post gets more unwieldy than it already is, I leave you with Shaker Maud @ Shakesville | On Being a Woman, Not a “Female.” “Referring to women as ‘females’ defines them solely in terms of gender, denying them any other attributes of personhood, and specifically denies them womanhood, marking that as a condition which is the speaker’s to confer or withhold based on their list of qualifications.”

quick hit: jo walton reviews ‘gaudy night’

27 Saturday Mar 2010

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Thanks to Hanna who pointed me toward this lovely review of Dorothy Sayer’s Gaudy Night, posted by Jo Walton @ Tor.com. If you haven’t ready Gaudy Night and don’t wish to know certain key plot points, don’t click through. However, I encourage all those who have read and loved the Lord Peter/Harriet Vane novels to check out Walton’s astute analysis. I offer these two paragraphs up as a sampling.

This is a book about women — culprit, victims and the primary detective are women. Annie’s closest mirror is Mrs Goodwin, also a widow with a child away at school, who has trained as a secretary. We also see two old students, one whose marriage has ruined her mind, and one who has made a team with her husband and works with him. Then there’s the young don Miss Chilperic, who is engaged to be married, and will therefore leave the college. It was actually illegal for married women to teach in Britain before WWII. Sayers doesn’t say this because she assumes her readers will be utterly aware of it and can’t imagine things being any different, but if ever there was anything that should be footnoted for a modern audience, this is it.

The other academics might as well be nuns, they are devoted not just to scholarship but to virginity. This is said explicitly—and really in 1936 those were the choices. Marriage meant giving up the work, and not marrying, for women, meant maintaining virginity. This leads me to Harriet. Harriet lived with a man in Bloomsbury without marrying him, somebody else murdered him, and she was tried for the murder and acquitted because of Lord Peter (Strong Poison). Because of the notoriety of the trial, Harriet’s sexual status is known to everyone—and some people consider her utterly immoral because she had sex without marriage. This attitude—that people would care—is completely dated, gone like the dodo, and I have to work at understanding it. Harriet, in her thirties and unmarried would be presumed to be a virgin were it not that her cohabitation had been gossip in the newspapers after her lover’s death. Now the fact that she has had sexual experience is public knowledge, and affects people’s behaviour towards her.

As I said, you can check out the entire review on Tor.com.